A Nightmare Picasa Scenario

[Jason Dunn]

As long-time readers of this site know, I'm a big fan of Picasa. I recommend it to everyone and install it as the default photo editor/organizer on every computer in my sphere of influence (friends, family, etc.). I use it myself, but never for editing. Why? One simple reason: it forces me to keep a second copy of every photo it edits in case I ever want to go back to the original. For many people, that might be a great feature, but for me it's a massive hassle. I use FolderShare (http://www.foldershare.com) to keep all my photos in sync among multiple computers, and FolderShare has this nasty bug where upon sync, it makes hidden files and folders visible. What this means is that if an original image is hiddeon on one PC, after a sync it will be visible, and suddenly I have duplicates of my photos. It's ugly, and there's no way to turn this "feature" off.

I found another reason to loathe this feature: I was helping a client migrate from an ancient Dell computer running XP to a new HP Slimline PC (http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_can_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=desktops&a1=Usage&v1=Everyday+computing&series_name=s3000e_series) running Vista (impressive little machine!). The client in question had about 8000 photos, and many of them were edited in Picasa. I copied over the My Pictures folder to an external hard drive (which was painful with the Dell only having USB 1.1) then put the pictures into the Pictures folder on the Vista machine.<!>

Guess what happened? The client opened Picasa and wondered why she had duplicates of all her photos. I thought "Well how did that happen...oh no!". You guessed it, the copying over the pictures somehow made the "hidden" Picasa originals viewable. What's worse is that Picasa used to store the originals in a folder called "Originals" (how...original) but in this instance all of the originals were in the same folder as the edited images - making it essentially impossible to try and hide them again. Ugly. So ugly.

The client in question how has to go through her 8000 photos and manually delete the originals, or the Picasa-edited versions, depending on which it is she wants to keep. It's completely ridiculous - I suggested that she switch to ACDSee (http://www.acdsee.com) instead so that if she makes edits the changes are actually saved.

Picasa, you've really disappointed me here - I don't know that I want to tell others to use you any more until you approach this problem in a much smarter way.

[Vincent Ferrari]

I wouldn't recommend ACDsee to my worst enemy if I wanted them to die at their desk. It's slow, glitchy, has a non-standard interface, and overall just flat out sucks not to mention it's loaded with bloat. I bought the pro version when it came out hoping it would be better and it was even worse than the "standard" version.

If all they're doing is rudimentary editing, Photoshop Elements has a great built in file manager. IView (Expression Media now, I think?) is infinitely more usable (although a bit pricey).

Either way, I would NEVER recommend ACDsee to anyone. Picasa has its quirks, but it's pretty solid, particularly for the price.

In the future, use the backup / restore function when moving a Picasa library and your problems will be solved. I've done it numerous times. The nice part of doing it that way is that you keep all your ratings, etc.

[Tim Williamson]

I'm with Jason, ACDSee for basic editing/clean-up, and Picasa for viewing. Although, I haven't had the time to try Photoshop Elements yet.

I always manually make an "Archive" folder under each photoshoot folder, where I make a copy of all pictures taken. Then I can tweak and delete the pictures from the main folder, and always still have a backup on-hand.

[Jason Dunn]

I wouldn't recommend ACDsee to my worst enemy if I wanted them to die at their desk. It's slow, glitchy, has a non-standard interface, and overall just flat out sucks not to mention it's loaded with bloat.

Whaaaaat? 8O What flavour of crack ARE you smoking?? :lol: ACDSee is LIGHTING fast and not bloated at all. What are you comparing it to - notepad? Sure, it's slower than notepad by a split second. But compared to Photoshop Elements, and even Picasa, it starts up way faster and is very snappy and responsive. I use ACDSee for many of my basic photo edits because it's so fast.

Photoshop Elements has a great built in file manager.

It's sooooo sloooooow. Everything about Elements is slow, although on my new system it's actually reasonably fast finally (the editor part at least).

In the future, use the backup / restore function when moving a Picasa library and your problems will be solved. I've done it numerous times. The nice part of doing it that way is that you keep all your ratings, etc.

Hmm. The default backup is set only for CD/DVD, so that's what I thought it was capable of...but once I dug into it more and created a new backup set, I see there's an option to do a hard drive export of the library, and that should work. I still think it's fairly idiotic that I should have to do that though...but thanks, I think this will work.

[Michael Knutson]

the year, not the OS. I've tried to standardize as well on Picasa, but I keep going back to this older version of ACDSee for edits, it seems very fast (and stable) on my current system (iMac running XPP). I've tried various upgrades of ACDSee, but I keep going back to this ancient version. It just runs. No crashes, no mysterious handling (or mis-handling) of edits. So I'm in the Picasa *and* ACDSee camp, and try to use the best features of each. BTW, I did try the Mac version of ACDSee and was underwhelmed.